Immunization with vaccines remains a cornerstone of protection against threat of disease and infection. The key difficulty in vaccine development is rapidly matching a vaccine, or antitoxin, to a specific threat. Current vaccine development strategies rely on the identification and characterization of antigens that can be targeted to successfully eradicate infection or disease. Current vaccine development strategies are time- and labor-intensive and can only commence once a threat emerges. Such strategies are also impractical for generating personalized vaccines to combat disease for which target antigens varies among individuals. Current vaccine development strategies are therefore insufficient if a new and serious threat were to emerge, for which sufficient time were not available to identify and characterize target antigens before such a threat could be contained. Current vaccine development strategies are also insufficient for generating personalized vaccines for the general population.
Thus, there is a need for a technology platform for generating personalized vaccines and to contain serious threats that quickly evolve, are fast-acting, and/or highly contagious.